Did Speculating Harm Or Kill Valiant Comics?
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- Heath
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The reason for speculating on Valiant was because it was better than most everything else. Valiant caught the attention of the speculators not because of triple gate-fold foil stamped covers polybagged with a trading card. They caught the attention of the speculators because of the quality of the content.
The reason the speculators fled comics in general was because they realized it was all crap. Sadly, by that point, Valiant was no exception.
The reason the speculators fled comics in general was because they realized it was all crap. Sadly, by that point, Valiant was no exception.
I'm glad that while we appear to be on the eve of another speculator burst, what with the ridiculous variant covers now, that some companies are still putting out amazing stories. Thankfully WD and Invincible have thus far kept the variant covers to a minimum (for now). Hopefully this time the only thing that happens if it bursts is variants will be better controlled and used.Heath wrote:The reason for speculating on Valiant was because it was better than most everything else. Valiant caught the attention of the speculators not because of triple gate-fold foil stamped covers polybagged with a trading card. They caught the attention of the speculators because of the quality of the content.
The reason the speculators fled comics in general was because they realized it was all crap. Sadly, by that point, Valiant was no exception.
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Valiant was hurt by a lot of things. I think it always suffered a style problem as a pre-teen I remember looking at Magnus and thinking "Did someone steal this guys pants or did he chose to dress like a female disco dancer?" They all had this retro look to them when the bulk of the comic book reading audience is too young to appreciate the concept of retro.
Image may have been founded on crappy storylines and characters with 24 pack abs and tiny heads but it captured young readers. And when competing with the giants like Marvel and DC there is only so much room for new publishers. If anything killed Valiant it was Spawn and Image releasing a new flashy Issue #1 Collectors Issue each week.
Image may have been founded on crappy storylines and characters with 24 pack abs and tiny heads but it captured young readers. And when competing with the giants like Marvel and DC there is only so much room for new publishers. If anything killed Valiant it was Spawn and Image releasing a new flashy Issue #1 Collectors Issue each week.
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Going to disagree. Magnus' style choice was explained in the pre-Unity comics. It's a tunic, not a skirt. And Magnus got a makeover in the Malve War. If anything, the makeover helped speed things up.PhoneyBone wrote:Valiant was hurt by a lot of things. I think it always suffered a style problem as a pre-teen I remember looking at Magnus and thinking "Did someone steal this guys pants or did he chose to dress like a female disco dancer?" They all had this retro look to them when the bulk of the comic book reading audience is too young to appreciate the concept of retro.
Image may have been founded on crappy storylines and characters with 24 pack abs and tiny heads but it captured young readers. And when competing with the giants like Marvel and DC there is only so much room for new publishers. If anything killed Valiant it was Spawn and Image releasing a new flashy Issue #1 Collectors Issue each week.
As for his white boots... They were supposed to be brown. However, due to a miscommunication between the artists, the colorist left them white when the boots hadn't been tagged to be colored brown. This came out in a Russ Manning interview reprint in Alter Ego a few years ago. Russ thought he didn't need to label them to be colored brown because it was common sense. Well, the rest is comic book history.
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"<i>Greed is good.</i>" - Gordon Gekkomegatronthe3rd wrote:But I thought Greed was good?Zaphod wrote:Speculating saved Valiant, greed killed it.
To a point, yes, greed is good. Greed is a motivator, a driving force. It causes people to think of new ways to do things. It is a muse. Greed is a problem when someone uses others through surreptitious, dishonest, and evil means like a vampire sucking the blood from a victim. That greed is not good.
John Paulson taking out CDS insurance on subprime loans and paying a yearly premium for that insurance? That generated wealth for the issuer of the insurance. When the sub primes failed, it generated enormous wealth for his clients. (I will also wager it brought the sub prime fiasco to a head sooner than later.)
Bernie Madoff's actions? That generated bankrupcy and economic devastation. All in the name of personal greed.
Just my $0.03 on greed.
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Greed is never good.Unblessed wrote:"<i>Greed is good.</i>" - Gordon Gekkomegatronthe3rd wrote:But I thought Greed was good?Zaphod wrote:Speculating saved Valiant, greed killed it.
To a point, yes, greed is good. Greed is a motivator, a driving force. It causes people to think of new ways to do things. It is a muse. Greed is a problem when someone uses others through surreptitious, dishonest, and evil means like a vampire sucking the blood from a victim. That greed is not good.
John Paulson taking out CDS insurance on subprime loans and paying a yearly premium for that insurance? That generated wealth for the issuer of the insurance. When the sub primes failed, it generated enormous wealth for his clients. (I will also wager it brought the sub prime fiasco to a head sooner than later.)
Bernie Madoff's actions? That generated bankrupcy and economic devastation. All in the name of personal greed.
Just my $0.03 on greed.
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Considering its one of the deadly sins (Avarice) I'd agree that greed is never good.Cyberstrike wrote:Greed is never good.Unblessed wrote:"<i>Greed is good.</i>" - Gordon Gekkomegatronthe3rd wrote:But I thought Greed was good?Zaphod wrote:Speculating saved Valiant, greed killed it.
To a point, yes, greed is good. Greed is a motivator, a driving force. It causes people to think of new ways to do things. It is a muse. Greed is a problem when someone uses others through surreptitious, dishonest, and evil means like a vampire sucking the blood from a victim. That greed is not good.
John Paulson taking out CDS insurance on subprime loans and paying a yearly premium for that insurance? That generated wealth for the issuer of the insurance. When the sub primes failed, it generated enormous wealth for his clients. (I will also wager it brought the sub prime fiasco to a head sooner than later.)
Bernie Madoff's actions? That generated bankrupcy and economic devastation. All in the name of personal greed.
Just my $0.03 on greed.
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They can explain why he is dressed like a female disco dancer but he was still dressed like a female disco dancer. In the end their characters just didnt look as exciting as all the other new stuff coming out at the time. I love Magnus now but as a kid I, like a lot of kids, picked it up looked at it and said this guy does not look cool and instead picked up some god awful comic by Liefeld instead probably... because it looked cool.Unblessed wrote:Going to disagree. Magnus' style choice was explained in the pre-Unity comics. It's a tunic, not a skirt.PhoneyBone wrote:Valiant was hurt by a lot of things. I think it always suffered a style problem as a pre-teen I remember looking at Magnus and thinking "Did someone steal this guys pants or did he chose to dress like a female disco dancer?" They all had this retro look to them when the bulk of the comic book reading audience is too young to appreciate the concept of retro.
As for his white boots... They were supposed to be brown. However, due to a miscommunication between the artists,
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from my understanding, many of the speculators were sportscard vampires who destroyed their industry in the late 80's. Now that the sports card industry was in the toilet, they rolled onto the comic book industry like a pack of leper wolves. The sports card dealers all went out of buisness with their crap, and then, like lepers in a field of death, they marched onto the comic book industry, looking to make money for their pathetic lives. If it were only the comic book people speculating on comic books, then maybe valiant could have survived. But, the combination of comic book dealers + ex-sportscard dealers that flooded the market, was a recipe for disaster.
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Buy was the change in quality due, at least in part, to speculation?X-O HoboJoe wrote:Heath wrote:But it was the change in quality that killed them.
The idea "well, they will buy anything, so let's just get as many books out there as fast as possible".
If speculation hadn't hurt them, would we have seen the same decline in quality?
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I disagree.Heath wrote:The reason for speculating on Valiant was because it was better than most everything else. Valiant caught the attention of the speculators not because of triple gate-fold foil stamped covers polybagged with a trading card. They caught the attention of the speculators because of the quality of the content.
They caught the eye of comic book FANS because of the quality of the content.
They caught they eye of speculators because of the drastic price that early back issues could fetch - due to the quality of the comics and the scarcity for the fans.
The speculators couldn't have cared less if Harbinger 1 was a great book or not - they only saw it selling to fans for $100 (or more) because it was a great book, and thought it would apply to all valiant comics.
Again, I disagree. Speculators left because the comics they "thought" would be worth money weren't worth the paper they were printed on. Real comic fans left because the material being put out was crap, and the focus was catering to speculators.The reason the speculators fled comics in general was because they realized it was all crap. Sadly, by that point, Valiant was no exception.
Chris
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Indeed. His ouster allowed weaker-willed individuals to take over and yes, I include Bob Layton.Drift wrote:The change in quality was an indirect result of the speculator boom though. If it weren't for the nonsense that was going on the others in charge would never have pushed Jim as hard as they did to squeeze more cash out. There never would have been the disagreement and Jim wouldn't have been forced out. Jim would still have overseen things and the quality would have remained high. Half the *SQUEE* they pulled would never have happened had Jim still been there as he had a genuine love for what he was doing and wanted to see it grow naturally.Heath wrote:It harmed them. What killed them was the drastic decrease in quality. Abandoning the "house style." Forgetting the tight continuity. Bringing in big name talent that took the properties too far away from their original framework. Giffen with Magnus, Jurgens with Solar, Sears with X-O, for example. Not to mention the utter crap with stuff like the later H.A.R.D. Corps, Psi-Lords, etc.
The speculators hurt them just like they hurt the rest of the market. But it was the change in quality that killed them.
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Excellent points. I lived and owned a store during this time and this statement is 100% correct!
magnusrobot12 wrote:from my understanding, many of the speculators were sportscard vampires who destroyed their industry in the late 80's. Now that the sports card industry was in the toilet, they rolled onto the comic book industry like a pack of leper wolves. The sports card dealers all went out of buisness with their crap, and then, like lepers in a field of death, they marched onto the comic book industry, looking to make money for their pathetic lives. If it were only the comic book people speculating on comic books, then maybe valiant could have survived. But, the combination of comic book dealers + ex-sportscard dealers that flooded the market, was a recipe for disaster.
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This may all well be true... but it still looks like a skirt to anyone who hasn't read the comic, which was Phoney's point.Unblessed wrote:Going to disagree. Magnus' style choice was explained in the pre-Unity comics. It's a tunic, not a skirt. And Magnus got a makeover in the Malve War. If anything, the makeover helped speed things up.PhoneyBone wrote:Valiant was hurt by a lot of things. I think it always suffered a style problem as a pre-teen I remember looking at Magnus and thinking "Did someone steal this guys pants or did he chose to dress like a female disco dancer?" They all had this retro look to them when the bulk of the comic book reading audience is too young to appreciate the concept of retro.
Image may have been founded on crappy storylines and characters with 24 pack abs and tiny heads but it captured young readers. And when competing with the giants like Marvel and DC there is only so much room for new publishers. If anything killed Valiant it was Spawn and Image releasing a new flashy Issue #1 Collectors Issue each week.
As for his white boots... They were supposed to be brown. However, due to a miscommunication between the artists, the colorist left them white when the boots hadn't been tagged to be colored brown. This came out in a Russ Manning interview reprint in Alter Ego a few years ago. Russ thought he didn't need to label them to be colored brown because it was common sense. Well, the rest is comic book history.
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I don't think speculators hurt VALIANT really either way any more than what was going on in the comics industry as a whole at the time. Marvel had just seen just about all of their hottest artist take a walk and start Image. VALIANT was just starting, and as we know, the print runs really weren't huge till the nasty Shooter/Massarsky divorce.
If anyone remembers what went on then, Marvel flooded the market with product, some good, most mediocre, some really bad. Remember the early/late monthly editions of pretty much all the top characters? If not I am sure you've seen them in back issue boxes. DC was printing a lot of crap too, anything just to get shelf space in the LCS's to compete. Most guys were pretty loyal to their Marvel runs, so you picked up Uncanny now twice a month, and Wolverine and X-Men too. For the younger collectors with limited dollars, this was like hitting the market with a sledge hammer.
Oh, and don't forget, at the same time, the Card guys pretty much started speculating on Comics as their card business matured because they had standardized grading, just like what's happened to comics with CGC. I don't know how many card shops I've gone in and found boxes of comics from 17/18 years ago. Every card dealer at every flea market had a box of comics on his table back then.
I've always felt that VALIANT got a bad rap for printing to demand and orders and taking the money that was suddenly available to them after the success of Unity. Speculation didn't hurt them at all, what hurt them was the change in their business model once they started making money, and that blame rests on the shoulders of Massarsky, BWS (for a while), and Layton, pretty much.
By the time Massarsky soaked Acclaim for 65mil, VALIANT had already been a sinking ship for a while.
If anyone remembers what went on then, Marvel flooded the market with product, some good, most mediocre, some really bad. Remember the early/late monthly editions of pretty much all the top characters? If not I am sure you've seen them in back issue boxes. DC was printing a lot of crap too, anything just to get shelf space in the LCS's to compete. Most guys were pretty loyal to their Marvel runs, so you picked up Uncanny now twice a month, and Wolverine and X-Men too. For the younger collectors with limited dollars, this was like hitting the market with a sledge hammer.
Oh, and don't forget, at the same time, the Card guys pretty much started speculating on Comics as their card business matured because they had standardized grading, just like what's happened to comics with CGC. I don't know how many card shops I've gone in and found boxes of comics from 17/18 years ago. Every card dealer at every flea market had a box of comics on his table back then.
I've always felt that VALIANT got a bad rap for printing to demand and orders and taking the money that was suddenly available to them after the success of Unity. Speculation didn't hurt them at all, what hurt them was the change in their business model once they started making money, and that blame rests on the shoulders of Massarsky, BWS (for a while), and Layton, pretty much.
By the time Massarsky soaked Acclaim for 65mil, VALIANT had already been a sinking ship for a while.
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cjv wrote:I disagree.Heath wrote:The reason for speculating on Valiant was because it was better than most everything else. Valiant caught the attention of the speculators not because of triple gate-fold foil stamped covers polybagged with a trading card. They caught the attention of the speculators because of the quality of the content.
They caught the eye of comic book FANS because of the quality of the content.
They caught they eye of speculators because of the drastic price that early back issues could fetch - due to the quality of the comics and the scarcity for the fans.
The speculators couldn't have cared less if Harbinger 1 was a great book or not - they only saw it selling to fans for $100 (or more) because it was a great book, and thought it would apply to all valiant comics.
Again, I disagree. Speculators left because the comics they "thought" would be worth money weren't worth the paper they were printed on. Real comic fans left because the material being put out was crap, and the focus was catering to speculators.The reason the speculators fled comics in general was because they realized it was all crap. Sadly, by that point, Valiant was no exception.
Chris
Chris is right on here.
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I agree here too, and as a comic collector at the time, and fan, I hated dealing with the card guys.UnknownTales wrote:Excellent points. I lived and owned a store during this time and this statement is 100% correct!
magnusrobot12 wrote:from my understanding, many of the speculators were sportscard vampires who destroyed their industry in the late 80's. Now that the sports card industry was in the toilet, they rolled onto the comic book industry like a pack of leper wolves. The sports card dealers all went out of buisness with their crap, and then, like lepers in a field of death, they marched onto the comic book industry, looking to make money for their pathetic lives. If it were only the comic book people speculating on comic books, then maybe valiant could have survived. But, the combination of comic book dealers + ex-sportscard dealers that flooded the market, was a recipe for disaster.
Cards are a commodity and the demand for them is pretty much only ruled by scarcity.
Comics have artistic value that also, you'll buy a comic just to enjoy reading them knowing they'll never be worth anything probably.
I didn't know you used to own a store.
UnknownTales wrote:Excellent points. I lived and owned a store during this time and this statement is 100% correct!
magnusrobot12 wrote:from my understanding, many of the speculators were sportscard vampires who destroyed their industry in the late 80's. Now that the sports card industry was in the toilet, they rolled onto the comic book industry like a pack of leper wolves. The sports card dealers all went out of buisness with their crap, and then, like lepers in a field of death, they marched onto the comic book industry, looking to make money for their pathetic lives. If it were only the comic book people speculating on comic books, then maybe valiant could have survived. But, the combination of comic book dealers + ex-sportscard dealers that flooded the market, was a recipe for disaster.
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That was 90% of the problem, yeahmagnusrobot12 wrote:from my understanding, many of the speculators were sportscard vampires who destroyed their industry in the late 80's. Now that the sports card industry was in the toilet, they rolled onto the comic book industry like a pack of leper wolves. The sports card dealers all went out of buisness with their crap, and then, like lepers in a field of death, they marched onto the comic book industry, looking to make money for their pathetic lives. If it were only the comic book people speculating on comic books, then maybe valiant could have survived. But, the combination of comic book dealers + ex-sportscard dealers that flooded the market, was a recipe for disaster.
I saw this first-hand myself. Let me tell you, many of the sports card dealers back then were loaded with cash, having made a killing for years when their hobby was going good.xodacia81 wrote:That was 90% of the problem, yeahmagnusrobot12 wrote:from my understanding, many of the speculators were sportscard vampires who destroyed their industry in the late 80's. Now that the sports card industry was in the toilet, they rolled onto the comic book industry like a pack of leper wolves. The sports card dealers all went out of buisness with their crap, and then, like lepers in a field of death, they marched onto the comic book industry, looking to make money for their pathetic lives. If it were only the comic book people speculating on comic books, then maybe valiant could have survived. But, the combination of comic book dealers + ex-sportscard dealers that flooded the market, was a recipe for disaster.